Biden Administration and Iran: Secret Deals and Appeasement Back on the Table?
by Majid Rafizadeh • April 3, 2021 at 5:00 am
"The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime. I am again asking direct, yes or no questions on the United States' involvement in facilitating a South Korean ransom payment to Iran. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue." — Congressman Bryan Steil (R-WI), letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, March 25, 2021.
When President Biden was vice president during the Obama administration, the administration was all too eager to grant concessions to the Iranian regime and, it turns out, made multiple secret deals with the mullahs..... These secret deals meant that when sanctions against Iranian banks were lifted and permission given to the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to resume conducting business, there was no longer any mechanism to check or stop Iran's illegal activities such as advancing its ballistic missile program.
The Obama administration also helped swiftly to lift all four rounds of UN sanctions against Iran -- sanctions it had taken decades to put in place. Iran's military sites also were exempted from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency; other inspections were only to be at the times and places of Iran's choosing -- if ever.
Another concession, usually overlooked, is that Iran never even signed the JCPOA deal -- what sort of deal, then, is that?
Appeasement policies, secret deals and generous concessions to predatory regimes do not work, as history has repeatedly shown. They only empower and embolden leaders whose record reveals that they have no intention of honoring whatever they agreed to in the first place, and for whom commitments have been mainly a means of buying time to accomplish the goals they really want.
The Biden administration is ratcheting up its appeasement policies towards the Iranian regime in an apparent effort to revive the 2015 nuclear deal -- which by the way, Iran never signed.
US President Joe Biden made his intention to return to the nuclear deal public before he took office; after, he appointed as Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman -- a key negotiator in the talks which led to the nuclear deal in 2015 during the Obama administration. Biden actually publicized Sherman's professed accomplishment:
"She has successfully rallied the world to strengthen democracy and confront some of the biggest national security challenges of our time, including leading the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran Deal".
The administration proceeded to revoke the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed terror group, as an officially-designated terrorist organization.
